Bacon Body Wash

Bacon short-circuits something in your brain. You smell it before anything else, before you can even think about it. Your body just knows—there’s something you want.

Someone made body wash out of it. Archie McPhee’s Bacon Body Wash is real, costs four bucks, and smells exactly like you’d expect. It’s the kind of stupid that matters—not throwaway clever, but stupid as in someone genuinely thought, What if we made bacon soap? and then did it without questioning themselves.

There’s a real gap between what if and why would anyone, and that’s where the interesting design lives. Most novelty products are just ironic, just winking at the camera. But bacon body wash commits. It doesn’t apologize. It smells like breakfast. If you wear it, people will want to be closer to you for the wrong reasons, which is its own kind of funny.

What interests me is what novelty products reveal about desire. Fancy bath stuff sells refinement—you’re supposed to become someone better through botanicals and careful scent. But bacon body wash doesn’t pretend. You’re not getting sophisticated. You’re getting hunger, pure and simple. And apparently that’s what people actually want.

I haven’t bought it, but I think about it sometimes. Not because I need to smell like bacon, but because the fact that it exists feels like winning something. Someone made this thing, took it seriously enough to manufacture it, and put it in gift shops. In a world of optimization and algorithms, that kind of committed stupidity is close to an act of resistance.